This description relates to operation of surveillance systems.
It is common for businesses to have a surveillance system for detecting presence of conditions at their premises, and for sending video from cameras to a central monitoring station. It is especially common for wide areas such as central business districts to have many such cameras that are monitored by operators at central monitoring stations. Operators at stations can view a geo-referenced image on a computer screen with camera locations represented by objects displayed on the image. The image can vary from a satellite image, an overhead image captured by a terrestrial camera or a map. When an operator has identified a point of interest on the image, the operator may desire to view relevant live or recorded video and/or audio or still images for that point of interest.
However, locating an appropriate camera or cameras can be difficult especially when there are many such cameras and the cameras have different properties, such as being fixed or having pan and/or zoom capabilities, as well as the cameras' physical locations and the cameras' field of view. Such a problem is partially solved by a combination of a direct geospatial search & rank and direct association of a camera with potential partner cameras. One problem arises however is that as the number of cameras becomes large it may take an unacceptable amount of time to find and control relevant cameras to the point of interest with a search and rank direct association approach.